Islam and the West

[Originally published in International Herald Tribune]

Three decades ago, few would have predicted that the hottest topic of the early 21st century would be Islam. Now, not a single day passes in the Western media without news or comment about Islamist terrorism or calls for Islamic reform.

What's going on, exactly? Some hawks in the West talk about a "clash of civilizations." This is a perilously shallow idea. The world's 1.2 billion Muslims, some of whom live happily in Western societies, do not constitute a single entity that sees itself engaged in a war of civilizations.

Yet many Muslims have deep suspicions and worries about the West, and the way the West deals with Muslims deeply influences their thoughts. So it is imperative that Westerners understand the nature of Islam and its current crisis.

Islam is similar to Judaism in many ways: It is a strictly monotheistic, law-based and communal religion. Moreover, it teaches its followers that they have a special role in God's plan to guide the world. Early generations of Muslims saw the fulfillment of this promise in the grandeur of the medieval Islamic civilization. In the 16th century, however, the Islamic world began to lag behind the West.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the last notable Islamic power, in the early 1920s, the Muslim world, especially the Arabic Middle East, entered into an acute state of crisis. Anticolonialist tendencies produced the ideology of radical Islam, which is quite different from Islam as a religion.

The great British historian Arnold Toynbee astutely likened the encounter between the modern West and the Islamic world to the relationship between the Roman Empire and the Jewish people during the time of Jesus.

According to Toynbee, the secularist dictators in modern Muslim countries and their secular elites - who look down upon Islam as the faith of the unwashed - are similar to the Herodians who associated themselves with the Romans to the point of self- denial. The modern Islamist terrorists, in contrast, are analogous to the Zealots who decided to wage a war on the Romans hoping that violence would bring about the Kingdom of God.

What the Islamic world needs today is to find a path that is different from Herodianism and from Zealotry. Muslims need to hear more messages that advocate neither a neglect of the divine nor bigotry in its name. They need to hear, one might say, something similar to the message of Jesus: that the Kingdom of God is a spiritual one, that godliness is more important than blind tradition, and that the law is made for man, not the other way around.

In other words, Islam needs to be saved from medieval traditions and modern political hatreds, and to be reunderstood as a God-centered civil faith that will have no trouble being a part of the open, pluralistic modern society.

Some Westerners doubt whether this is possible. But since the 19th century many Muslim intellectuals have been arguing for Islamic reform in order to eliminate authoritarian, bigoted or misogynist traditions. And such ideas are bearing fruit: Just last month, Turkey's official religious authority, the Diyanet, declared that it will remove statements that condone the mistreatment and oppression of women from the Hadith, the non-Koranic commentary on the words and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed. There are many other moves toward reform throughout the Muslim world.

All such reform attempts have to happen within Islam, of course, but Westerners can help, by invalidating the radical Islamist discourse.

This discourse has two main themes, one cultural, the other political. The cultural theme is that the West is a godless, corrupt civilization, a universal acid that destroys all faith and morality. Unfortunately, the long-established association between the West and the Herodians of the Muslim world has added much to this argument. Those rulers have also created a bad name for secularism, practicing it not as just separation of religion and state, but as suppression of the faith and the faithful.

This must change: Western believers and Muslims should do more to discover their common ground in Abrahamic monotheism and its moral values, not to mention in trade and economics. And the West should refrain from supporting anti-Islamist ideologues and former Muslim self-haters.

The political theme of the radical Islamic discourse is that the West, especially the United States and its closest allies, are leading a war on Islam. Unfortunately, every episode of abuse in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, and every civilian who has died in Afghanistan and Iraq, has added fuel to the fire. Recently, Israel's violent reprisals in Gaza and Lebanon have fanned this flame.

What the West can do is to insert a wedge between the radical Islamists and the peaceful Muslim majority, by making clear it has no problem with Islam as a religion and by emphasizing the moral values that Christians and humanists share with Islam - above all, respect for the individual.

The more the Muslim majority sees that Western values are compatible with theirs, the more they will see the anti-Western Zealots among them as fanatical troublemakers.

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